Committee sends advice to diversity office

Posted: Monday, November 26, 2001

By Lee Shearerlshearer@onlineathens.com

An ad hoc committee at the University of Georgia has finished work on a set of recommendations defining what the University of Georgia's new Office of Institutional Diversity should be and do, and is set to meet with UGA Provost Karen Holbrook about the recommendations next week.

Among the recommendations of the Office of Institutional Diversity design team: de-emphasizing standardized tests such as the SAT and instead using a more broad-based set of criteria in making admissions decisions; actually monitoring how well campus organizations and units are doing at achieving more diversity; and analyzing UGA's recruitment efforts in the light of what is being done at universities that have had better success at achieving a more diverse campus.

The committee was formed by UGA College of Education Dean Louis Castenell after he was named interim head of the newly created office.

The committee of students, faculty and staff came up with dozens of specific recommendations -- getting faculty members involved in recruiting students, reaching out to African-American alumni to help with recruiting, and ensuring that there is diversity on campus governing bodies such as faculty grievance panels and promotion and tenure committees, for example.

The specific items are aimed at reaching broader goals -- increasing the numbers of minority students and faculty, particularly African Americans, to numbers more in line with the rest of the state, and changing the UGA campus culture to see diversity as important.

UGA officials have talked about diversity issues on campus for several years, but UGA's enrollment of African-American students has declined steadily since reaching an all-time high of 6.8 percent in 1995. This year, it dipped to 5.7 percent. By contrast, the state's African-American population is about 29 percent.

Only three of the state's 34 public colleges and universities -- Dalton College, Gainesville College and North Georgia College and State University -- have a lower percentage of African-American students than UGA, according to Board of Regents statistics.

The committee met Nov. 16 to put the last touches on its recommendations before turning them over to Holbrook. Holbrook is scheduled to meet with the committee Dec. 6 to talk about the report, and after that it will be up to Holbrook and UGA President Michael Adams to decide whether to accept the committee's recommendations for UGA diversity.

Two key features of the team's report are the ideas of showing UGA units and organizations how they can build diversity, and building accountability in the process -- rewards for success, penalties for failure.

That does not mean the office will be some kind of policeman, however, Castenell explained in an interview.

''We're not going to slap somebody's hand if they're doing something wrong, but we will put out an annual report with recommendations,'' he said. ''If a unit is not doing what they ought to be doing, or they're not doing it well, we might go to them and say, 'What's your problem?' and then say, 'At the University of Texas in 1994, they had the same problem and this is how they fixed it. There you go -- now fix it.'

''They can choose to fix it, they can choose not to fix it, but in our report at the end of the year we will say we recommended that. It remains the responsibility of the supervisor to deal with that or not. Accountability is making it very plain, based on empirical information, that this is happening or not happening.''

But the office won't just tell units to fix it, Castenell said -- it will also help by doing the research, finding out what has worked at universities which have done a better job of achieving diversity.

Castenell said he hopes to avoid the typical backlash of resentment when a school creates an office specifically to increase diversity.

But he's also trying to get away from the attitude that UGA's shrinking minority presence is due to uncontrollable forces.

''I'm trying to get away from, 'We're doing all that we can,' '' he said. ''If you're doing all that you can, how can you have no yield?''